'General Education,' 1.5 stars

"General Education" is kind of like a science-fair project slapped together at the last minute -- a sad, withered potato pierced with copper wires, rotting on the counter next to a resplendent baking-soda volcano. You can't help but feel a little sorry for the poor spud.

The film puts in about as much effort into winning a prize ribbon as that hypothetical potato battery. Defiantly humorless, the comedy is little more than a grab-bag of familiar high school-film cliches populated with bland characters played by barely-there actors. It was clearly a labor of love for no one.

High-school senior Levi Collins (Chris Sheffield) is on his way to a heck of a life. Accepted on a full athletic scholarship to a prestigious college, Levi is poised to achieve the tennis greatness that has run in his family for generations. Which would be awesome if he wanted to play tennis for a living, which he doesn't. Oh, and if he hadn't failed his senior Earth Science class.

That means clandestine summer school for the teen, who can't bring himself to tell his overbearing mayor father (Larry Miller) or alcoholic mother (Janeane Garofalo) that he didn't really graduate. Meanwhile, his tennis rival, Chad (Tom Maden, who mugs squint-eyed at the camera like a discount James Franco), threatens to strip him of the scholarship while thwarting his efforts to pass his class.

It's boring enough that the drama centers on Levi's inability to communicate his post-high-school desires to his father -- that's only the plot to roughly a third of all movies set in high school. But those longings are just words on paper, as no characters capable of experiencing human emotion exist on screen.

These cliche plot points are glued together with jokes that confuse randomness for punchlines. You know you're in for a rough trip when a movie opens with a tepid Shake Weight joke that stumbles into the party about two years too late to be funny. If that's not your speed, you can look forward to the gut laughs of seeing the protagonist in a raccoon costume and a woman in a wheelchair playing the steel drums.

The culprit? First-time filmmaker Tom Morris who, if IMDb is to be believed, is only 23. That makes some sense of this fresh-from-film-school mess. He's no cinematic wunderkind, but no boom mikes were obviously visible, so good on him for that, at least.

The film seems to be aiming for the off-kilter humor of "Napoleon Dynamite," but that film's bizarreness was spliced with a sweetness that made it go down easier. This is little more than a motley assortment of abrasive characters and a blind stab at quirky charm. It misses the mark considerably.

Reach the writer at barbara.vandenburgh@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8371.